


Storm King's Thunder: Princes & Kings

by valamerys



Series: Storm King's Thunder campaign fic [1]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Gen, Team Waterdeep Backstories, angst angst angst, juicy character parallels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:14:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23095411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valamerys/pseuds/valamerys
Summary: Rekhien and Theseus talk about Waterdeep and, to Rekhien’s horror, themselves.
Series: Storm King's Thunder campaign fic [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1659832
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	Storm King's Thunder: Princes & Kings

**Author's Note:**

> Traveling the Ten Towns warning of the giant attacks suffered by Bryn Shander, the Stormchasers find themselves with time for contemplation.

In the quiet moments, when Rekhien can set down the thoughts of pixie dust and nightstones and frost giants, it’s hard to believe his current situation is real. It seems patently fucking absurd that years learning the feeling of Waterdeep’s cobblestone streets underfoot, memorizing where rotten wood on the docks hid the sounds of sly steps and where you could get elbow-deep in a silk merchant’s purse before the Watch noticed— that it all went like paper in a fire, just that quickly. That that isn’t his life anymore, and isn’t likely to be again soon, unless his new companions are just a vivid, frustrating dream that sooner or later he’ll wake from with a terrible hangover. 

Which had seemed possible, at one point, right up until they blew up Xovu’s house, fled the city in the company of a murderer prince, and were ferried halfway across the continent by a magical floating giant with a magical floating tower. Rekhien is pretty sure that his unconscious imagination is not that creative.

On this particular night, he’s so deep in his thoughts that he doesn’t realize he’s staring in said murderer prince’s direction across the fire until he speaks.

“Rekhien?”

Rekhien starts, gives a slight wheeze at the influx of freezing cold air in his lungs. “What?”

It’s just the two of them on watch beneath the wind-whipped darkness of northern night, sitting on boxes of rations and firebrandy hauled off the wagon; Marin and Phyn went to sleep in their tents hours ago.

“You were giving me an odd look.” Theseus leans his elbows on his knees, loosely gripping the trident in gloved hands. “Typically when you give people an odd look you’re about to fire a sharp projectile at them.”

Rekhien gives him a lopsided smile. “You’re fine, big guy. I’m not dumb. Gotta have somebody to hide behind.”

Theseus raises an eyebrow at him but doesn’t respond to that. A frigid breeze tosses a lock of his blonde hair free from the hood of his coat, makes the low fire flicker and snap.

Maybe Rekhien is bored, or maybe it’s just so terrifyingly empty on these plains that it feels like conversation holds ghosts at bay. Before they slip into silence again, Rekhien exhales long and annoyed and tells the truth.

“Honestly, I was thinking that if someone had told me six months ago that I’d be freezing my ass off at the spine of the world with the godsdamned prince of Waterdeep right now, I’d have shanked them for being a liar.”

Amusement tugs at Theseus’s features. Rekhien foolishly assumes he’s coming up with something profound, but when Theseus finally replies, all he says is, “Well, you know what they say about fortune-telling.”

It is too fucking cold for this. “I take back what I said. I am going to stab you, actually.”

Theseus ducks his head and laughs at that.

It cuts distressingly close to the unspoken but obvious truth about the pair of them: their existence as perfect opposites from the same festering disaster of a kingdom, Waterdeep’s laureled golden son and one of its many bloodstained shadows. Theseus’s idiotic desire to save it and Rekhien’s absolute desperation to get out and leave it to its fate. Rekhien has no intention of having that conversation, now or ever, but this trip must actually be making him insane, because the useless fact he’s carried around with him since Theseus confessed his identity comes spilling from his mouth.

“You know, I saw you, once.” 

Theseus looks up, and Rekhien cringes at himself.

“In a parade.” He immediately wishes he hadn’t said it, wishes he didn’t feel the need to explain. “When the army returned from the war with the Northlander Isles.”

Rekhien had been— ten summers old? eleven?— and so intent on pilfering coinpurse and pocket, navigating the crush of revelers that flanked the street, that he hadn’t looked up until the enormous shadow of the first palanquin swallowed him.

The procession was like nothing he’d ever seen, a radiant display a thousand worlds removed from the splintering slums that blackened his bare feet. Armored infantry thundered by in glinting rows, glamoured acrobats tumbled and danced, and mages conjured glittering flame in every color that made the crowds shriek and cheer.

But most radiant of all were the royal court.

Swarmed by more guards than Rekhien’s limited arithmetic skills could hope to count, the grandeur of the cavalcade yielded to a single man steering a massive, groomed black war steed, identifiable by the sheer opulence of his gilded regalia— and the crown on his head. And some lengths behind the king of Waterdeep, on an elegant white mount, rode his son. 

The prince was of the same coloring as his father, the same strong posture, a gleaming circlet placed amongst his flaxen hair. Dust from the street kicked into billowing, hazy clouds lent him an aura as he, unlike the king, turned his head. His gaze swept the sea of bodies and banners— and passed over Rekhien. 

Of course he hadn’t actually  _ seen _ him, a single face among thousands. And of course Rekhien, a hundred paces away, hadn’t remembered his features well enough to match them to the skittish stranger in Daggerford a dozen years later. But in the present, across the fire, Theseus looks intently at Rekhien, expression inscrutable, and there is a terrible symmetry to it.

“I remember the parade,” Theseus murmurs. “That was... a long time ago.”

Rekhien nods mutely, hopes Theseus won’t press him on the memory. And he doesn’t— instead Theseus’s gaze slides to the fire, goes unfocused and distant. “I was seventeen that summer, and I spent the whole war begging my father to let me fight in it.”

Rekhien is very good at Not Having Serious Emotions, inconvenient as they are, but a spark of— anger? resentment?— flares in his gut at that before he can tamp it out. Nobody ever stopped him from fighting anything. By seventeen he had a collection of scars to prove it.

Theseus goes on, and a note of something hard-edged and cold winds through his voice. “But princes and kings don’t fight in wars. They sit in gilded tents and at marble war-room tables and decide how to spend the lives of those who do.”

“Sounds like a decent gig,” Rekhien says quietly.

Theseus’s attention refocuses on Rekhien as if seeing him for the first time. “Can I ask you something?” 

Rekhien sighs and scrubs a hand across his face, half-numb cheeks stinging with cold. He should have made Marin take this shift. “Sure.”

It isn’t snowing proper, but the freezing wind carries flecks of ice that catch in Theseus’s beard and glitter in the firelight as they melt. The question comes out haltingly, as if he’s hesitant to string the words together. “What was your life like? In Waterdeep?”

Rekhien snorts, out of surprise more than anything. What kind of question is that? Does Theseus really expect him to dredge up the childhood in a criminal’s shadow, the coming of age as an  _ investment _ who had to steal his worth in coin if he wanted to eat that day?

“Dangerous. Unhygenic. And the company was questionable,” Rekhien says flippantly, as if it’s a joke. “A lot like my life in this party, actually.”

That’s not even remotely true, not in the ways that matter. But he’s not about to explain it. He reaches down to the edge of the space they cleared for the fire to pick up a long, unignited twig, and dips the end of it into the flames just to have something to do with his hands. Theseus is deathly still across from him, clearly realizes he’s said something wrong.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine.” Rekhien draws the twig away, watches the flame that clings to it eat at the wood.

It’s not fine, but if Rekhien starts to think about how not fine it is, he may never stop.

“You know that I’m not… always good at saying what I mean,” Theseus presses on, strained. “But my intent is— even after we depose the Order of the Hood, I’ll return to Waterdeep one day, do as much good as I can there. And I could use someone like you to help me.”

The thimbleful of fire wears away another inch of the twig in Rekhien’s hand, leaving a curled black whisper in its wake. He’s only half-listening. “What, like a spy type? Depends how much you’re paying me.”

“No, I mean— “ Theseus exhales and casts for phrasing. “You know parts of the city I never will. The people I only see at… parades, the ones rulers like me have failed.” He has the decency to sound ashamed, at least. “You could help me… help them. If you’re willing.”

The flame reaches Rekhien’s fingers at exactly the same moment that he manages to read between the lines and pick out the implication in what Theseus is saying, the one that has nothing to do with Rekhien at all.  _ Rulers like me. _

He drops the burning remnants of the stick into the hard-packed snow at his feet, where it gutters out with a hiss. “I’m sorry, you— hang on—” Rekhien only half-suppresses the hysterical little laugh that bubbles up in his throat. “You think I can help you when you’re  _ king,  _ is that what you’re saying?”

Theseus isn’t laughing.

“You still want to be king. After  _ killing _ the king,” Rekhien goes on, putting every bit of incredulous amazement he can muster into the word. He leans forward to raise his eyebrows at Theseus, attempt to impress on him some faint shadow of how insane this is. “You know every guard in Waterdeep would arrest you on sight, right? That technically you’re a criminal on the run just like me?”

“I don’t—” Theseus cuts himself off hotly, looks towards the ground. “It’s never been about what I  _ want _ .”

Rekhien almost laughs at that, but he doesn’t get the chance. When Theseus speaks again it’s even and collected, the steel-spined speech he sometimes summons from nowhere. 

“The war— the one we threw a  _ parade _ for when we won— was little more than a blockade of an isolated island to force them to comply with my father’s predatory trade policies. Innocent people starved and we called it victory.” 

Rekhien thought they’d already seen the full breadth and width of Theseus’s angst, but in a single, sinking moment, he realizes that none of them had any idea how deep it goes. That it might swallow them all.

“I have never wanted the throne.” Theseus’s gaze alights on Rekhien again, haunted in the half-dark. “And I know my actions have made things complicated. But ruling is my destiny. I have the same birthright my father did, and I have a responsibility to use it to be a better king than he was.”

That’s the real difference between them, Rekhien thinks with manic, sleep-deprived clarity. Not privilege, or values, or stature: Theseus believes himself  _ destined _ for something; owed it, even. And Rekhien has known as long as he’s known his own name that he is not.

Rekhien comes up short a response, manages a bewildered series of blinks and a single stumbling sentence. “You’re fucking crazy.”

“Maybe,” Theseus turns the trident over in his hands thoughtfully. “Or maybe duty looks like madness when you’ve never seen it before.”

Rekhien lets out a low groan before Theseus even finishes speaking, presses his palms to his eyes in disbelief. “I don’t  _ care _ about your fucking city, Theseus. I only grew up there because I was a kid with no other option.”

Theseus says softly, “So was I.”

“You’re the  _ prince _ !” Rekhien fires back, choked with frustration. “It’s not even remotely the same!”

“Isn’t it?” It’s a sincere question; the uncertainty has crept back into the iron of Theseus’s voice. “Neither of us had a say in what we became. And we each paid a terrible price to break free of that. But now I—  _ we—  _ have a choice.”

“Well I  _ choose _ to let Waterdeep go fuck itself.” A streak of regret flashes through Rekhien, quickly stifled. Waterdeep has done no more for him than any kingdom doesn’t for its bastards and orphans, why should he give a shit what happens to it?

Theseus gives a minute shake of his head, heavy-browed and painfully blue-eyed in the low light. “You have the city in your blood as much as I do, Rekhien.”

Rekhien leaps to his feet, and an instinctive retort tears hotly from his throat: “I am  _ not like you _ .”

Somewhere in the distance the northern wind howls, and the outburst is swallowed by it, bright and then gone like the swirling red embers the fire spits out. Silence sits heavy between them for a moment, in the vast cold space the heat of the flames doesn’t banish. Rekhien should probably sit back down. He doesn’t.

“You said I was a criminal just like you,” Theseus says after a moment, words careful. “Are we alike or not?”

Rekhien isn’t the punching type— he needs his fingers dexterous far too badly to go around smashing them into jaws or noses— but for a moment it is blindingly tempting to cross the campsite and launch a fist at Theseus’s stupidly symmetrical face.

“I’m gonna go wake Phyn up,” Rekhien says darkly instead, without breaking Theseus’s unwavering eye contact. “He’s had long enough to meditate.”

Theseus says nothing to that, and Rekhien turns towards Phyn’s tent, the weight of a princely gaze on his shoulders. Just as he begins to think he’s safe, ice crunching beneath his steps, Theseus speaks again.

“Rekhien.”

Rekhien reluctantly pauses, pastes an expression of utmost exasperation on his face before he turns back around. “ _ Yes _ ?”

For a moment, Rekhien can see the echo of the young golden prince on horseback in the set of Theseus’s shoulders, behind the tired eyes and wind-chapped cheeks. Theseus considers him with honest calm. “I’m glad we’re allies now, whatever else we are.”

All those muscles, and absolutely no self-consciousness. Rekhien grimaces at him. “I really hate when you get corny.”

Theseus gives a half-smirk. “I know.”


End file.
